A slide for sleds or small toboggans for human occupancy has previously been used and sold in the United States. This slide led toward a pool of water so that the human occupant sled would accelerate down the slide and then skim across the surface of the body of water, as an amusement ride. Such slide had a sled support surface comprised of a series of rollers set transversely of the path of the slide, and more specifically each roller was an aluminum tube journaled at each end on a fixed shaft in the slide support structure. The slide had a curved lower section and it was found that the rollers wore out from use, especially those rollers in the curved lower section which were subjected to high G forces and high acceleration forces from the successive sleds. Also, bearing failures resulted even though many different forms of bearings were tried, including ball bearings with steel balls, roller bearings with steel rollers, plain bearings, nylon bearings, and oil-impregnated wooden plain bearings. The latter appeared to be generally the most satisfactory; however, they still were subject to bearing failure and to wearing through of the 0.060 wall thickness of the aluminum rollers, especially at the curved lower section. Also, such rollers were noisy in operation, which was sometimes a liability in a quiet area. In addition, the rollers had spaces therebetween and there was always the concern that a person might get his hand or foot down between such rollers. A principal reason that the lower section rollers seemed to wear much more quickly than the upper section rollers was that the sled had accelerated to a high speed by the time it struck each of the lower section rollers in succession, and such rollers had to be accelerated almost instantaneously to the speed of the sled; otherwise, there was sliding contact between the roller surface and the sled rather than a rolling contact. Additionally, the heavier the bearing, the harder it was to accelerate the roller to the speed of the sled. This seemed to limit the terminal velocity of the sled off the lower section of the slide, and hence limited the distance which the sled would coast across the water surface.
Other water slides have been in operation and are generally of two different types. The first type is one which curves laterally, is usually made from fiberglass-reinforced resin plastic, and may have a generally semicircular cross section. This type of slide is meant for body sliding without any protective mat or sled. The second type is one made from sprayed concrete, such as gunite, again which may be laterally curving and have a generally semicircular cross section. Since the surface of this concrete-lined slide is rather rough, a protective mat is used to protect the person sliding down into a pool of water. The problems with these two types of slides are economic: they require a large volume of water, namely around 300-500 gallons per minute with the first type and 600-950 gallons per minute with the second type. When the water must be pumped up 30 to 40 feet, the expense for the pumping of this large volume of water makes the operation of the water slide generally prohibitive unless a large number of people are utilizing the slide.
Accordingly, the problems to be solved are how to reduce the wear on both the slide and the sleds, how to make the sled ride more smoothly, how to make the ride more exciting and faster, and how to make the sled coast further across the water while making the ride safer.